Post by queensgirl on Jan 29, 2006 0:17:48 GMT -5

In this episode, from the beginning, we know things are going to be different.

There is Maddie’s very strange interlude where she puts on an evening dress and acts as if she’s, well, ready to unleash herself on the world. (It is compared, through separate shots, with the nefarious actions of the Joan Tenewich character.) Then she calls in to fake being sick. Another huge contradiction for her. Why not just say she’d like to take a day off? She might be fibbing because of the short notice—even the boss usually has to tell people when they’re going to be in, and the procedure for time off at many companies is that you must ask for it well in advance. Still, it’s strange considering that since she runs the agency, Maddie still feels she has to make something up in order to get away with her planned day off. Well, it’s not like she’s going to tell everyone at Blue Moon what she really has on her mind, so then it makes a little more sense.

I wonder—and this is a tangent, sorry, but I have to get it out of the way—what would have happened if she had actually never showed up at all that day, never gone to have her angry talk with David, never revealed any of her plans at all, and instead just gone out to roam freely and do whatever the heck it was on her mind.

Now that’s a stumper. Poor David was at cross ends enough when he did get to know what she wanted. How much worse would it have been for Dave had Maddie just gone on some crazy trip and not come back ‘til who knows when. Maybe she would have met Sam, maybe somebody else, and by the time she got back to home base, might have felt that her connection to the job and those people was so tenuous, she’d give up on it entirely.

But that’s another story. Back to the first thing.

The poker game in the office is not out of the ordinary for Dave, who really wouldn’t know ordinary if it walked up and kicked him. It is in another solar system by Maddie’s well-known ideals of appropriate. But she walks right by it. Right into her office, where she sits down, starts doing some things, and David has to breeze in there to ask why the heck she didn’t lose her temper like Mother Nature intended.

Now, because we don’t see the beginning of the card game, I don’t think it can be said for sure that David set it up deliberately to tick Maddie off, although I’m sure he expected to enjoy that benefit (if she’d noticed). However, the brazenness of the employees is a challenge to Ms. Hayes’ authority, and perhaps what takes place next bears more than a little similarity to this dare.

David senses all is not well with the captain of the ship. He asks her what’s bothering her, and that sets in motion her famous declaration of the desire to be reckless. (And he doesn’t like it at all.)

Angry at what she sees as David’s hypocritical double standard, Maddie storms out, and winds up getting involved in the Night That Never Ends. David, worried to death about her, has to go and follow.

Notice that Maddie does not seem to appreciate the fact that David does tell her why he said what he said, and it might not be the first reason she thinks. Dave does not exactly say, “Men can do it but it’s bad for women,” even though it sounds that way a bit; instead, what he actually says is, “There are a lot of crazy people out there.” In other words, you don’t know how to tell the people who want a good time from the people who could be a lot of trouble. If you don’t understand all the dangers out there, you could get hurt. In her view, it’s patronizing. In his, it’s deep concern.

Notice, also, the theme that links the two incidents, the poker game and then the jarring announcement: sexual revelation. Literally, going from concealing something to making it obvious. You could take the poker game, where people go from being dressed to not being so dressed, as the acted-out campy joke version of what Maddie is talking about, namely being uninhibited.

Only the poker game and the discussion also differ in one important way.

With the game, everybody but Maddie knows about it and thinks it’s fun.

With the discussion, just these two are privy to what’s going on. (Bert is sort of an ancillary person; he does find out who they’re after, but he’s not in the office during that original conversation.) Maddie only lets him know after much prompting, and then even after David decides to follow her, he lies about why he’s doing it. He tells Bert it’s a surveillance case.

So: were David and Maddie challenging each other by their opening actions in the episode?

Was David either his usual jokey self, or was he trying to tick Maddie off so he could enjoy snickering at another one of her temper tantrums? I’m surprised he didn’t try to cheese her off even further by saying, “Join in!” as she ran by… Missing a chance like that is just not like our man!

If Maddie were really worried that David wouldn’t like what he were about to hear, she might have kept it to herself. But she could see how bad he felt, so she answered him, even though it turned out to be thoroughly unpleasant for them both…

Why was it so important for her to say something like that to David? She usually hates to go public with her innermost feelings in that regard, whereas David talks about it all the time. So why carry through on telling him, and that stuff, and at that time?

Was she, excuse the term, throwing down the gauntlet? I’ll go ahead and say it: did she want it to be him? Was she trying to let him know, read between the lines already, that sort of thing?...

Perhaps this is her long-delayed version of Dave’s standard jokes and innuendo.

There is, also, one very interesting trait about David’s response to Maddie’s announcement.

Normally he would be, I dare say, positively thrilled to hear that kind of thing from her, especially because she’d been so resistant to him for so long.

But he doesn’t make a joke about it, even though he was just laughing at the poker game; indeed, he seems horrified. Her? This sort of thing? What?!

Maddie thinks he’s being paternalistic and hypocritical, because he’s always as free as he wants, but David sees it more as a matter of, You’d better look out because you really don’t understand what this means.

Indeed, Maddie’s been off the singles market for so long, it almost seems as if David thinks she…dare I say it, is waiting for him, or belongs to him. Was he still trying to get his courage up to talk to her even before the course of events provoked it out of him?

It’s almost as if he’s a high school letterman and he discovers his girlfriend wants to take somebody else to the dance.

David does not make any kind of crude offer to be the man she’s looking for. Old Dave would have done that in five seconds. Here he lets the opportunity walk right past him, because suddenly this is a whole lot more important than some stupid joke.

Just as Maddie not being upset about the poker game is ‘not like her,’ David not being rude and provocative is ‘not like him.’ All of a sudden he’s acting the part of either a jealous boyfriend or an overprotective father.

Instead of talking anymore, Maddie decides to go out and do something. Then David must do so as well.

So I have to wonder, how early did their respective chains of thought get started? Were they finally just tired of stasis, and at the point where they had to break out somehow?

The unstoppable force met the unmovable object, and something had to give.